Counting Their Pennies

Mallory Elementary Kids Learn To Deposit And Save

HAMPTON — The quarters slid forward one at a time as second-grader Chris Hinton gave each a shove with his little index finger.

"Twenty-five, fifty, seventy-five, a dollar," he repeated five times as the quarters were pushed together in loose groups of four.

"How much is that all together?" asked his teacher, Darlene Ingram.

"Five."

"Five what?"

Chris hesitated. The word "dollars" had managed to slip his mind amid all that counting, but he came up with it eventually. Then Robin Warren stepped into the picture.

She opened Chris' one-page register booklet and noted the $5 deposit to his savings account. Warren is a representative of the Newport News Shipbuilding Employees' Credit Union. Once a week, she comes to Mallory Elementary and helps approximately 40 children in second and third grade deposit spare change into their own personal accounts.

In the process, she helps them learn some basic math skills.

"Last week, Chris couldn't count money at all," she said. "He had the hardest time. Today, he did beautifully."

Warren helped the students open their savings accounts last month. Their accounts will remain open until the end of the school year, when their money will be returned to them with 3.75 percent interest. The students are also allowed to make one withdrawal per year.

While shipyard credit-union branches work with various schools throughout the Peninsula to set up savings accounts, Mallory Elementary School targets the program toward second- and third-graders because they are the ones learning how to count and manipulate money.

Ingram noted that second-graders are required to "count, compare and make change" as part of the Standards of Learning in math. They are also required to understand how economic choices are made as part of their social studies SOLs and to know "the different ways money increases in value through savings and investments."

What better way for them to learn that than to practice counting and saving their own pennies, dimes, quarters and bills, she said.

Several students already had big plans for how much they wanted to save and how they wanted to spend their money.

Eight-year-old Chris hoped to save $152. He was very precise about how much he wanted to save, though he wasn't sure exactly what $152 could buy.

Devin Parker, 7, said he hoped to save enough to buy a car - "or a boat if I want to go fishing."

His classmate, Danielle Brown, had even more ambitious goals.

"I would like to save $1,000 or something," she said. "Be rich. I just want to save it until I go to college, get a degree and buy a house or something."

Sandra Tan can be reached at 247-7854 or by e-mail at stan@dailypress.com